Bollocks to Brexit, please

The title of this post is a refined version of our main chant in central London on Saturday, for the esteemed and polite readers of this equusasinus blog.

The number of people marching in Saturday’s immensely joyous gathering for a People’s Vote on the Brexit deal was estimated at 700,000 but some estimates put it more towards a million. Professor A.C.Grayling the famous atheist said 1.2 million but he will believe anything. (Err… joke.)

I flew in from Alicante to Gatwick at seven o’clock on Saturday morning. It was a very last-minute decision. I wouldn’t have afforded a return flight but I asked my daughter if she would fund me. She agreed instantly. After Brexit – if it happens – she will be Irish and I will be Spanish. This whole business is becoming more absurd than Monty Python: “What did the Europeans ever do for us?” Well let’s start with Saint Benedict and the unifying of Europe in early medieval times 400-500 AD; the growth of the universities in the 13th century: Oxford, Paris, Cologne, with the Franciscan and Dominican friars leading the development of philosophy; and so on, into the enlightenment and Erasmus, whose name is known to hundreds of thousands of student beneficiaries of European funds for education.

My daughter Alys – who came down with her mother from north Wales – met up with Bremain In Spain at Green Park and then I managed to rendezvous with everyone in Curzon Street, as I came off a plane from Alicante delayed by fog at Gatwick.

The Spanish on the march were curious about Alys’s “No Pasarán” republican flag.I don’t know much about trade and economics. I am a retired Geography teacher. But I know an expert when I see one, and Jason J. Hunter can argue the Brexiteers’ bollocks (excuse me) hands down. We have to win this now: it is no longer good enough to make excuses for the unthinking people who bought the lies of Farage, Gove, Johnson & company. It is no longer possible to see the referendum as fair – in the light of the revelations I have included in earlier blog posts here – and we must oppose it to the end.

Park LaneAfter several hours of stopping and starting we made it to Trafalgar Square – long after the speeches had finished in the destination we never arrived at, Parliament Square, and we stopped to eat sandwiches at the fountains under Nelson’s column. Alys had been on her feet since getting off the train at Euston at midday. She has spent several years learning to walk again without assistance after a serious hip defect.

Her mother and I were proud of the fact that she had completed a very gruelling march, and we made our way slowly through Covent Garden towards the Travelodge Hotel where we were staying overnight.

And now I learned, first hand, what has become of the country where I was born. In the crowded streets around Covent Garden, filled with Saturday night revellers, a shrill middle class English woman walked up to my daughter – seeing “Stop Brexit” on her balloons – and briefly screamed insults at her before disappearing anonymously into the crowd.

Alys had been photographed by so many during the march, with her Spanish flag around her shoulders and her Euro beret and balloons – with the names of my donkeys on them, and the friends we have here in Spain. Now she learned first-hand what a divided country she lives in, thanks to Cameron, Farage, Gove, Johnson and the other Bad Boys of Brexit, with their dodgy money and their vulture capitalist agenda, supported by an unthinking populance who don’t even know they have been conned.

There was a great play in the late 1970s by David Edgar. It was called Destiny and it was about the way the loss of empire affected the British national psychology and turned many into racists and xenophobes, feeding the National Front and other overtly nazi movements. I went to see the RSC production at the Aldwych Theatre in 1977 with Alys’s mother. Now Alys was experiencing such vile post-colonial British hatred from a loathsome middle class example of exactly that phenomenon… In well-heeled expensive Covent Garden, on a Saturday evening, less than 300 metres from the Aldwych Theatre where we had seen that play, Destiny in 1977.

So Bollocks to Brexit and Bollocks to fascism…

And polite readers of this blog – having read this far – may forgive me if I don’t say “please”.

I think the atmosphere on the demonstration was the best advert you could have for the spirit of Europe.

I remember a crazy bagpiper suddenly flying past at great speed playing the Ode to Joy from Beethoven’s 9th, and it just seemed the best crazy moment you could have without eating magic mushrooms! And the placard saying “Even Baldrick had a better plan.”

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Finestrat town hall: Matilde and the mirror donkey

Matilde let out a bray of surprise when she saw her reflection in the mirrored window of Finestrat town hall. Click on the image to go to a sound file of donkeys braying in turn in a market. There is a great selection of different braying sounds.

Finestrat Weather from AEMET

El Parral is not a donkey sanctuary

I bought two donkeys in 2010 and both turned out to be pregnant. I couldn’t risk the foals going somewhere they might not be treated well, so I kept them and ended up with four adults!

It was easy supporting them when I was working full-time but I am now retired on a very small pension. Food, regular vet and farrier fees, plus annual Ministry of Agriculture admin costs all add up. Any donations would be gratefully accepted. This is not a registered charity but simply a very low budget private keeper trying to give four donks a good life.